


something lonesome about you

by tiredhealer



Category: Dungeons & Dragons (Roleplaying Game), Favour of the Scribes, Original Work
Genre: F/M, cedwyn becomes a vampire, what to do when your god suddenly decides she hates you cause you're dating her wife, you get the vampire twink to make you a vampire hunk
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-14
Updated: 2020-09-14
Packaged: 2021-03-07 05:39:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,627
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26468074
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tiredhealer/pseuds/tiredhealer
Summary: ‘She’s left you, you know,’ she whispers and in her voice is everyone who has ever hurt him, every beast that has ever wounded him. In her whisper he hears his mother, leaving for the lake. ‘She is not coming back. And you’re going to die. You know that, don’t you? You’re going to die because you kissed her.’(Or: what happened to Cedwyn after the masquerade)
Relationships: Vercinjetorix/Cedwyn
Comments: 1
Kudos: 3





	something lonesome about you

She is there, and then in an instance she is gone, slipping through his fingers like ash, like smoke, like the fading embers of a flame.

He is fifteen again. Standing on the shore of a lake -  _ the  _ lake, the only lake there could ever be - clutching the last thing his mother made, staring at the surface, staring at something bigger than he could ever be. He didn’t understand why she left then, only knew she had to go. 

He thought he would understand in time. But he didn’t and so he doesn’t understand now either as Vercinjetorix turns to him, as her eyes go wide, as the violent light from Ho-Jin’s knife swallows the world. 

And then she’s gone. In the immediate aftermath her loss feels like a knife.

Then the real pain begins. 

***

Ju-Long is gone. But Min-Seo alone has become something terrifying, something too big for the room, something too monstrous to behold. Or at least, she might be, if Cedwyn didn’t fight monsters for a living. He looks at her, dripping gold from her mouth, silver from her eyes, and sees the weak points in her elbow and knees. The soft points of a monster. 

She places clawed fingers beneath his chin and tilts his head up, up, until she’s baring feral teeth at him.

‘She’s left you, you know,’ she whispers and in her voice is everyone who has ever hurt him, every beast that has ever wounded him. In her whisper he hears his mother, leaving for the lake. ‘She is not coming back. And you’re going to die. You know that, don’t you? You’re going to die because you kissed her.’

He stares back and refuses to believe. She laughs at him at first, then strikes him when he does not give her the fear she desires. 

Seraphima tends to his wounds. With shaking hands, she seals the gash along his cheek and says, ‘They must be coming. They have to.’

She doesn’t sound like she believes. His mouth is too full of blood to reply either way. 

***

They are locked in cells. Two by two, deep underground. He knows that is a mercy. The screams from above tell him everything. The last Cedwyn saw of the sky it was bleeding molten gold.

He’s in a cell with a vampire. Ironic, perhaps. Meant to taunt him, definitely. The vampire curls itself in the far corner from him, covering half of its face with its hair. 

‘I’m not going to kill you, monster,’ Cedwyn says eventually. He has no idea how long they’ve been here. His stomach aches. His throat burns.

Oh, how he’ll miss that burn soon. But he does not know that yet. 

‘What makes you think it’s you I’m afraid of?’ the vampire spits. 

Cedwyn looks at him. Really looks, for the first time. The thing has a gauntness to its cheeks, a red tint to the edges of its eyes.

‘Ah,’ he says slowly. ‘I see.’

‘Do you now?’

‘You need to feed,’ Cedwyn says. ‘And you’re not going to eat me.’

‘No, I’m not.’

Through the wall of their cell they hear a bubble of grating, near hysterical laughter.

‘I’ll eat him if I get a chance, though,’ the vampire mutters. ‘Your little lich won’t kill me for that.’ 

Vercinjetorix. He has been trying - and failing - not to think of her. Where is she? Why was it only their group and Ju-Long vanished when the blade hit? He’s tried asking Ho-Jin what was his intention with the blade and the answer he’d received was nonsense piled upon gibberish. After three attempts at questioning he gave up.

She’s alive out there somewhere. She has to be. How could there ever be a world without her? How could she be removed from the world so easily? She could not. A world could not exist without her. So she has to be out there, she has to be safe. 

Above him, another building collapses. The world is ending all around him. So maybe she is gone. Maybe he will never know either way, because he might never leave this cell. Min-Seo has not been back since they were all stuck in here, nobody has any idea of her intent. Does she even know? She was a creature of rot and ruin when she shoved them in here. She may have forgotten about them. 

Or maybe she’s leaving them in here for something worse. 

Cedwyn looks at the blood around the vampire’s eyes. 

No, that vampire is not worse. 

It’s the next day when he finds out what worse is. 

***

He wakes upon the shores of Arishkanae. The bank is shrouded in mist, engulfed by a cloud of pale smoke that rises from the water itself. He knows he cannot be here. He is in a cell in Scribestown, he has not seen the lake in years.

And yet here he is all the same. 

A woman emerges from the lake. She is as pale as the moon itself, her skin completely flawless, like it is not skin at all but rather carved porcelain. Her eyes are the darkness of the lake, her hair the reeds that float upon the surface. 

‘Hello, Cedwyn,’ she says. Her voice is the slide of water over skin.

‘Hello,’ he says, uncertain. ‘Do I know you?’

He feels as if he does. But it is as if he knows her from another life, or from a dream. It doesn’t feel quite real, this knowing. 

‘You have always known me,’ she says. ‘And recently, she gave you my name.’

_ She.  _ It has to be Vercinjetorix. Can only be Vercinjetorix. He thinks of all the names she has told him, all the secrets, and he knows it can be only one. 

‘Ilya.’

The woman smiles. Her mouth is as red as blood. ‘There we are.’

‘You are...the lake?’ he asks. A foolish question, perhaps. But he cannot help but ask.

‘I am,’ she stands before him now. Shorter than him, but only just. ‘I am and have always been the lake and all the lake can be.’ 

‘Why am I here?’

He thinks of what Min-Seo said:  _ you will die because you kissed her. _

Is that what she is here to do? Kill him?

‘I wanted to meet you.’

She walks around him in a slow circle. He resists the urge to tilt his head, to watch her go. The shore of the lake is rough stone beneath their feet but she glides as if she does not feel it. Perhaps she doesn’t. 

What does a god feel, after all?

When she stands before him again she’s taller than he is, and her features are sharper. He could cut his palm upon the jut of her cheekbone. 

‘Why?’ he whispers. 

‘Vercinjetorix is my bride,’ she says, and she does not need to elaborate upon what that means. Cedwyn knows what it is to be a bride of the lake. ‘She has served me faithfully all her life. Never a pause, never a hesitation. Her devotion has been unflinching.’

A pause.

‘Until you.’

And just like that, she has him by the throat. Her hand is as strong as the porcelain it seems to be, clenching tight around his windpipe. Cedwyn gasps as she squeezes down, cutting off his air supply. 

She starts to drag him towards the lake. He tries to fight her - and he is a big man, a strong man, he has spent his entire life fighting - but he cannot keep her off of him. She drags him down into the shallows, using her grip on his throat to force him down.

Ilya shoves his face beneath the water. And in the dark he stares up and he sees her not as a woman, but as the god she truly is. 

***

Cedwyn wakes from the first drowning retching. He finds the vampire kneeling over him, slapping his back to force the last of the water out of his lungs.

‘You see, this is why I don’t miss being mortal,’ it whispers. ‘The dreaming.’

‘I wasn’t dreaming,’ Cedwyn says. His voice is a broken crack. 

‘No, I can see that.’

Cedwyn looks down. It’s then he sees he is completely drenched. As if held underwater. 

‘Which god did you anger, hm?’

Before he can answer, the floor starts to move. It ripples and twists like a stew when it’s boiling. Like when something big is moving through still waters. Damp pools up between the stone, spills over the bars of the cage. 

Cedwyn and Sanjing scramble backwards together, practically in unison. Their backs hit the wall. Nowhere else to go.

They turn and claw at the stone, pounding at the other cell. 

‘Ho-Jin!’ Sanjing screams. ‘Help us you creature! Our cell is falling apart!’

‘Creature? Huh. Sounds like a you problem.’

The water rises. Seeps between the stone, flows over the tiles, closer and closer towards them. As the floor is overtaken by wet Cedwyn sees dark eyes beneath the water, watching him, hating him. 

Ilya. His god, the only god he has ever known, she wants him dead. And why? Because he kissed Vercinjetorix? Because he held her hand when she needed it, because he saw her turn undead and did not flinch?

No, he knows why. It is because Vercinjetorix loves him. And gods are greedy things. She does not want to share. 

‘It wants you,’ Sanjing whispers. ‘I should push you in and save myself.’

‘You should,’ he agrees. Were he a better man, he might jump in, might save Sanjing. But he won’t die for a vampire. 

In the end, neither are given a choice to save or be saved. A hand shoots out of the water. It grabs the bench they’re both sat upon. It pulls. 

They both fall into nothing.

***

This time, Ilya does not bother with pretence. She appears as a god, in her true, horrific form. Too many arms, dozens of eyes, skin that looks like it was carved out of tree bark. She is withered and gnarled and horribly, awfully old. 

As old as the world, or older still? The lake is eternal, so she must be too.

She chokes him with her dozen arms. She shakes him, thrashes him against rocks, she sinks him beneath the waves of Arishkanae and holds him there until his lungs burst. 

Every time he wakes he is back in the cell. Sanjing kneels over him, forces him to choke up water. He never thanks the vampire. They never ask for it. 

He is dying. It isn’t until the third death that he realises it, and when he asks Sanjing for confirmation the vampire only grimaces. 

So he dies. Ilya twists him and beats him but she cannot break him. Every time he claws his way back to the light, back to the cell. Vercinjetorix will be here soon, he knows it. Ilya would not be so desperate to kill him were she not. She wants him dead before Vercinjetorix can find him. 

And so he cannot die. 

‘I have an idea,’ he tells the vampire on his seventh death. ‘It may be a terrible one.’

His body is so weak. He cannot rise, so he merely lays upon the floor and waits for the next time the water will rise. His body is past being soaked, past being chilled by the cold. He may never be warm again. 

‘What is it? I’ll take terrible over this at this stage.’

‘She is drowning me,’ Cedwyn says. His lungs still ache from the last time. ‘But if I no longer needed to breathe…’

A pause. And then Sanjing begins to laugh. It is a bitter, biting thing. There is no joy in it. There is no joy anywhere now, it feels. But why should there be? Vercinjetorix is still not here. Will she ever be here? The only proof he has that she was ever real at all is the drowning. 

‘You are a monster hunter. And you wish to become a monster?’

‘I wish to live.’

Sanjing is still laughing. It seems to go on for a very long time, until a fist smacks against the wall.

‘What’s so funny?’ Ho-Jin asks.

‘Your continued existence,’ Sanjing snaps. 

He gets off of the bench. He kneels down beside Cedwyn. The days without feeding have been hard on him. He appears half a corpse and more. 

‘This will hurt,’ he says. ‘And it will change you forever.’

‘Better changed that dead.’

‘Spoken like a true vampire. You’re going to do just fine,’ Sanjing says. 

And then he sinks teeth into Cedwyn’s throat. 

***

The change is fire. No drowning here, no lake to fall into, no crushing tide to sink beneath. Instead his veins are turned to molten inside his skin, his body is thrown upon the pyre, he is bathed in an inferno. 

It makes him scream. He thought Ilya had broken his voice with the drownings; it seems he was wrong. He finds it here in this place of burning pain as his teeth grow to fangs in his mouth as his insides twist and turn inwards on themselves. 

And when it is done, when Sanjing has allowed him to feed from the black blood at his wrist, the water arrives. 

‘Shall we see if our little exercise in madness pays off?’ Sanjing hums.

The hand extends. He is pulled down into nothing and this time, he is ready. 

When Ilya tries to drown him, his lungs resist. What is water to a body that does not need air? She could hold him beneath the water forever and he would never need to rise for air. 

When she realises this, she clenches her fist around him. Those dozens of eyes turn upon him. ‘What have you done.’ 

It is not a question. It is a demand. What has he done to defy her so that she might unmake it.

But the unmaking has already been done. She cannot undo it. Her domain is water. His now lies in blood. 

He sinks fangs into that gnarled, withered hand. He tastes godblood upon his tongue and it is the sweetest nectar he has ever tasted. 

She screams. Her scream rattles the world, shakes it, dismantles it. She releases him and he floats upwards, on and on, until he breaks back into the light. 

Sanjing sees the blood smeared gold upon his lips and laughs, ‘It worked then?’

‘For now,’ he says. 

He does not doubt she will try again. She will try to find some new way to break him, to take him from Vercinjetorix. But whatever way she tries he will try right back.  _ See?  _ This transformation says.  _ I will do whatever I can for her. I will make myself monstrous and more if that is what it means to beat you.  _

But more never comes. Instead there is only the silence of the cell. The ache of this new fire in his blood. 

And then her. Vercinjetorix. Pale and beautiful, always beautiful, even when her dress is torn, her hair wild, her hands stained in blood. 

He is a monster now. And he did it for her, for them, but even so. A monster is a monster, no matter how it was made. 

‘I’m a monster,’ he tells her when he can stand to face her, because he will always tell her the truth, no matter how ugly it makes him seem. 

‘You’re beautiful,’ she replies. 

He knows she means it. He hears it in the tremble of her voice. Even if he does not deserve it, she means it. And perhaps in time he can believe it. 

For now, she is here. And the world is no longer ending. 

  
  
  
  



End file.
